What it means to be Christian in America. An excerpt. Originally
from August 2005 Harpers.

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten
Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors
of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's
wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage
may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline,
but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or
political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three
quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God
helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of
four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion
at the core of our current individualist politics and culture,
which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in
Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not
biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from
the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor.
On this essential matter, most Americans - most American Christians
- are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed
that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we
say we are a Christian nation - and, overwhelmingly, we do -
it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there
and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly,
these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11
percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote
in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in
2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite
philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting
the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans. And therein
is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly
Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in
its behavior. That paradox - more important, perhaps, than the
much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of
chocolate and cheese - illuminates the hollow at the core of
our boastful, careening culture, ours is among the most spiritually
homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you
look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent
of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison,
is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans
- about 75 percent - claim they actually pray to God on a daily
basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every
week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice,
it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else
that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic
one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure
of the behavior of professed Christians. That's what America
is: a place saturated in Christian identity.

But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing
on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he
had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion
- say, giving aid to the poorest people - as a reasonable proxy
for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion,
when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the
way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether
they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked,
welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we
find then?

In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last,
after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign
aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official
development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because
we were giving to private charities for relief work instead.
Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six
pennies, to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans
were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of
American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent
in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for
the least among us you want to propose - childhood nutrition,
infant mortality, access to preschool - we come in nearly last
among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point
is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation
trails badly in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly
Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories,
categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's
not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department
of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households
that were "food insecure with hunger" had climbed more
than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.

This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed
to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon.
Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent
rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that
of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by
a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least
should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners).
Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western
democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states
where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus'
strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at
a rate - just over half - that compares poorly with the European
Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held
down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by
countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare
our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce
rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the
top of the charts. Personal self-discipline - like, say, keeping
your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government
deficits? Do you need to ask? Are Americans hypocrites? Of course
they are. But most people (me, for instance) are hypocrites.
The more troubling explanation for this disconnect between belief
and action, I think, is that most Americans - which means most
believers - have replaced the Christianity of the Bible, with
its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with a competing
creed.

In fact, there may be several competing creeds. For many Christians,
deciphering a few passages of the Bible to figure out the schedule
for the End Times has become a central task. You can log on to
RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view
the world - at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three
points to 152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S.
pagans, "Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code
all products with radio tags." Other End-Timers are more
interested in forcing the issue - they're convinced that the
way to coax the Lord back to earth is to "Christianize"
our nation and then the world. Consider House Majority Leader
Tom De-Lay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging
his flock to support the administration, declared that "the
war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse."
DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225
Christian TV and radio stations. "Ladies and gentlemen,"
he said, "what has been spoken here tonight is the. truth
of God."

The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly
serious argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening
the End Times. But there's nothing particularly Christian about
this hastening. The creed of Tom DeLay - of Tim LaHaye and his
Left Behind books, of Pat Robertson's "The Antichrist is
probably a Jew alive in Israel today" - ripened out of the
impossibly poetic imagery of the Book of Revelation. Imagine
trying to build a theory of the Constitution by obsessively reading
and rereading the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and you'll get an idea
of what an odd approach this is. You might be able to spin elaborate
fantasies about presidential succession, but you'd have a hard
time working backwards to "We the People." This is
the contemporary version of Archbishop Ussher's seventeenth-century
calculation that the world had been created on October 23, 4004
B.C., and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on May 5,
2348 B.C., a Wednesday. Interesting, but a distant distraction
from the gospel message.

The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another
competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight
from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens
me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks
so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets
preached in these palaces isn't loony at all. It is disturbingly
conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your
individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers - not communities
but individuals: "seekers" is the term of art, people
who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children's)
lives but who aren't tightly bound to any particular denomination
or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus,
comfortable, suburban faith.

A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch
outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through
latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons
about "how to discipline your children, how to reach your
professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your
debt." On Sundays children played with church-distributed
Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly
aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of bestsellers compiled
monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association illuminates
the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by Joel
Osteen - pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a 16,000-seat
sports arena in Houston for its services - which even the normally
tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as "a treatise on how
to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals."
Nearly as high is Beth Moore, with her Believing God - "Beth
asks the tough questions concerning the fruit of our Christian
lives," such as "are we living as fully as we can?"
Other titles include Humor for a Woman's Heart, a collection
of "humorous writings" designed to "lift a life
above the stresses and strains of the day"; The Five Love
Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if
you're speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant
other; and Karol Ladd's The Power of a Positive Woman. Ladd is
the co-founder of USA Sonshine Girls - the "Son" in
Sonshine, of course, is the son of God - and she is unremittingly
upbeat in presenting her five-part plan for creating a life with
"more calm, less stress."

Not that any of this is so bad in itself. We do have stressful
lives, humor does help, and you should pay attention to your
own needs. Comfortable suburbanites watch their parents die,
their kids implode. Clearly I need help with being positive.
And I have no doubt that such texts have turned people into better
parents, better spouses, better bosses. It's just that these
authors, in presenting their perfectly sensible advice, somehow
manage to ignore Jesus' radical and demanding focus on others.
It may, in fact, be true that "God helps those who help
themselves," both financially and emotionally. (Certainly
fortune does.) But if so it's still a subsidiary, secondary truth,
more Franklinity than Christianity. You could eliminate the scriptural
references in most of these bestsellers and they would still
make or not make the same amount of sense. Chicken Soup for the
Zoroastrian Soul. It is a perfect mirror of the secular bestseller
lists, indeed of the secular culture, with its American fixation
on self improvement, on self-esteem. On self. These similarities
make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists
to posit themselves as embattled figures in a "culture war"
- they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture,
a culture of unrelenting self-obsession.

Who am I to criticize someone else's religion? After all,
if there is anything Americans agree on, it's that we should
tolerate everyone else's religious expression. As a Newsweek
writer put it some years ago at the end of his cover story on
apocalyptic visions and the Book of Revelation, "Who's to
say that John's mythic battle between Christ and Antichrist is
not a valid insight into what the history of humankind is all
about?" (Not Newsweek, that's for sure; their religious
covers are guaranteed big sellers.) To that I can only answer
that I'm a... Christian.

Not a professional one; I'm an environmental writer mostly.
I've never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday
school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church. But I've spent
most of my Sunday mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth
groups and stayed active most of my adult life - started homeless
shelters in church basements, served soup at the church food
pantry, climbed to the top of the rickety ladder to put the star
on the church Christmas tree. My work has been, at times, influenced
by all that - I've written extensively about the Book of Job,
which is to me the first great piece of nature writing in the
Western tradition, and about the overlaps between Christianity
and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I'm one of a fairly
small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the
Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism,
and Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention
articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical
community co-founded by Jim Wallis.

Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that
first got me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were
trying to get politicians to understand why the Bible actually
mandated protecting the world around us (Noah: the first Green),
work that 1 think is true and vital. But one day it occurred
to me that the parts of the world where people actually had cut
dramatically back on their carbon emissions, actually did live
voluntarily in smaller homes and take public transit, were the
same countries where people were giving aid to the poor and making
sure everyone had health care - countries like Norway and Sweden,
where religion was relatively unimportant. How could that be?
For Christians there should be something at least a little scary
in the notion that, absent the magical answers of religion, people
might just get around to solving their problems and strengthening
their communities in more straightforward ways.

But for me, in/any event, the European success is less interesting
than the

American failure. Because we're not going to be like them.
Maybe we'd be better off if we abandoned religion for secular
rationality, but we're not going to; for the foreseeable future
this will be a "Christian" nation. The question is,
what kind of Christian nation?

The tendencies I've been describing - toward an apocalyptic
End Times faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment
faith - veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels.
When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law
was, Jesus replied:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest
and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love
your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets.

Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power
has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps
the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in
all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were
supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked
person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn
die other cheek; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel
trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on
- a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective
reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of
love.

I confess, even as I write these words, to a feeling close
to embarrassment. Because in public we tend not to talk about
such things - my theory of what Jesus mostly meant seems like
it should be left in church, or confined to some religious publication.
But remember the overwhelming connection between America and
Christianity; what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political,
cultural, social question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies
and the salesmen of the televangelist sects, means to walk away
from a central battle over American identity. At the moment,
the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of
causes that do not reflect his teachings. The Bible is a long
book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them, some of it seemingly
contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love your neighbor
as yourself - not do unto others as you would have them do unto
you, but love your neighbor as yourself - will suffice as a gloss.
There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is
there any disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because
it is so counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating
it to themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance,
instructing the church at Galatea: "For the whole law is
summed up in a single commandment," he wrote: '"You
shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"

American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job
of loving the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all
Sunday talking about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation
is thriving you can be assured he's spending the other six days
visiting people in the hospital, counseling couples, and sitting
up with grieving widows. All this human connection is important.
But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little
farther away - particularly the poor and the weak - then it's
a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just
that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his
call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer
gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent
conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead
of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health
care for people who can afford it? File those under "God
helps those who help themselves."

Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected
governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify
themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative
- right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the
Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he'd never
voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found
himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest
Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest
paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of
four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000),
while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property
taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes,
and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax
- a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double
digits. So Riley proposed a tax hike, partly to dig the state
out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the
state's school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the
nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the
poor more carefully.

Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery
would have paid $1,432 in property taxes - we're not talking
Sweden here. But it didn't pass. It was crushed by a factor of
two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it
- meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians
who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state's
wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama.
"You'll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart,"
said John Giles, the group's president. "They just don't
want it coming out of their pockets." On its website, the
group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor
"results in punishing success" and that "when
an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the
individual." You might as well just cite chapter and verse
from Poor Richard's Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the
results are clear. "I'm tired of Alabama being first in
things that are bad," said Governor Riley, "and last
in things that are good."

A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should
do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend,
and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have,
give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words
have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition
of America - founded in 1989 in order to "preserve, protect
and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest
country in history" - proclaimed last year that its top
legislative priority would be "making permanent President
Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts."

Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that
a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer
to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should
have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of
course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular
society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would
have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call
for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow
missed Jesus' explicit refutation in the New Testament: "You
have heard that it was said, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if
anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also."

And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely
in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by
their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know
what they're talking about. They're like the guy who gives you
directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though
the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track. But
their theology is appealing for another reason too: it coincides
with what we want to believe. How nice it would be if Jesus had
declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting
that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed
to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have
a comparatively easy sell.

But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel
is too radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever
come close to realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness
it conflicts with all our current desires. Even the first time
around, judging by the reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome
news to an awful lot of people. There is not going to be a modern-day
return to the church of the early believers, holding all things
in common - that's not what I'm talking about. Taking seriously
the actual message of Jesus, though, should serve at least to
moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's
hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ
the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in
Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians
woke up to that fact, then the world might change.

It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches
that supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are
mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle
and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex
unions. And the Catholic Church, for most of its American history
a sturdy exponent of a "love your neighbor" theology,
has been weakened, too, its hierarchy increasingly motivated
by a single-issue focus on abortion. Plenty of vital congregations
are doing great good works - they're the ones that have nurtured
me - but they aren't where the challenge will arise; they've
grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the
language of sociology and politics. More and more it's Bible-quoting
Christians, like Wallis's Sojourners movement and that Baptist
seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.

The best-selling of all Christian books in recent years, Rick
Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life, illustrates the possibilities.
It has all the hallmarks of self-absorption (in one five-page
chapter, I counted sixty-five uses of the word "you"),
but it also makes a powerful case that we're made for mission.
What that mission is never becomes clear, but the thirst for
it is real. And there's no great need for Warren to state that
purpose anyhow. For Christians, the plainspoken message of the
Gospels is clear enough. If you have any doubts, read the Sermon
on the Mount.

Admittedly, this is hope against hope; more likely the money
changers and power brokers will remain ascendant in our "spiritual"
life. Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have
sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas
of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters - the
TV men, the politicians, the Christian "interest groups"
- have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty,
too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even
as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves
of ourselves - become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols.
It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come.
When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love
of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people
just come back for more of the same.

About the Author

Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College,
is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and
Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across Americas Most Hopeful
Landscape. His last article for Harpers Magazine, The
Cuba Diet, appeared in the April 2005 issue.

This is The Christian Paradox, a feature, originally from
August 2005, published Wednesday, July 27, 2005. It is part of
Features, which is part of Harpers.org.